Category Archives: Writing
So that’s February done and dusted then. Today’s post is coming to you from that strange a magical leap day that tacks itself to the end of February every four years. A place of wonder, mystery and Gregorian convenience. For me, at least, February has not been a month conducive to much writing. I do most of my writing on lazy weekends, sitting in my jim-jams, in front of a computer, drinking tea and slowly tapping out the odd word here and there. There were scant few such weekends this month. I’ve been off on a series of mini-adventures, gallivanting off into London to sample the musical styling of a German metal band and then a jaunt back to my quaint former home of Nottingham for a good old dinner and booze-up. The latter left me a little drained. I took Monday off from work planning to finish off this month’s wordascope in a blizzard of frenzied activity. Instead I spent the whole day sprawled on the sofa trying to work out if I was feeling sick or just really hungry. I eventually concluded it was a bit of both, although it was not so much “gut-rot” as it was, perhaps “gut-mould.” Any time in the evenings over the last few weeks was rapidly devoured by odd bits and bobs like cooking, and more recently work. Specifically defining my goals for the coming year in the strange and alien language of Managerial Moonspeak.
Although I feel as if I’ve made very little progress writing-wise this month my computer seems to disagree. There’s a file sitting snugly on my hard-drive that seems to contain about 2000 words, I’m not entirely sure how that happened. Can’t really complain about something like that can I?
Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: Callis, Faces in the Woods, Fantasy, Pictonauts, Short stories, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
As many of you know, I am a big fan of Twitter. 
Through its cyber-witchcraft I keep in contact with old friends and converse with strange people I never have, and probably never will, meet. People with beards, people with hats, people with kids, people with cats. It’s an interesting place filled with interesting people. Recently, one of the myriad of misfits, misanthropes, malcontents and musers I follow posted something on their blog. The person in question is a lady operating under the pseudonym of Porridgebrain. She’s one of those artsy types. She draws, she knits, she takes fancy artistic photographs, she also writes. Her blog hosted a wee writing workshop thing until it fell by the wayside last October. It has now, however, been raised from the grave. Once a fortnight a word is posted people write things based on that word, fun is had by all. Last Monday she threw up a post with the prompt of Second, and I thought I’d have a bash at it. Continue reading
5 Comments | tags: Clocks, Poetry, Seconds, Seconds Out, Tick-tock, Time, Writing | posted in Writing
So we finally arrive for but a brief and fleeting visit to the greatest of all months, February. I like February, not simply because it is the month of my birth (although I suspect that does bias me in some way), but because February is unique, flexible, changeable. February doesn’t play by anyone’s rules. With perhaps the exception of the rules of the Gregorian Calender, but you don’t mess with him, for he is well hard. February is the cool month, standing out from the crowd with it’s 28 days. Were February a person it would wear a leather jacket and have the strange and arcane powers of jukebox necromancy. It’s is also literally cool, well more cold really. The temperature of February being, on average, lower than the rest of the months of winter. Winter, of course, being the greatest of all the seasons, and even though having to pay for my own heating has lessened my love of winter, my love of February remains strong.
Not all people share my love of February however. An Old English word for February was Solmonath which means mud month, which if we’re honest is less than flattering. Although wikipedia tells me that the Finnish, for February is helmikuu, meaning “month of the pearl” which is quite beautiful. My blatant theft from wikipedia aside we should probably get down to business. What with it being the first of the month and all, you folks probably want a picture for the Pictonaut Challenge. You can be so needy sometimes!
Continue reading
3 Comments | tags: Faces in the Woods, February, Kekai Kotaki, Pictonauts, Short stories | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So here we are at the end of January, another month pissed away into the onrushing winds of merciless time. Time is such a dick sometimes, strutting around like it owns the place. Abstract concepts, eh? They’re bastards the lot of them. My futile struggles against the crushing inevitability of existence aside, it also means that it’s time to draw another instalment of the Pictonaut Challenge challenge to a close. So there’s a lining to this cloud. Whether it’s a lining of silver or a lining of a slightly less shitty brown on a wallowy, brown cloud of shit depends entirely on your point of view. Either way, you cannot begrudge my claim that there is, at the very least, some sort of lining.
So then, The Reliquary? What did you make of it?
Continue reading
1 Comment | tags: Cyber-punk, Pictonauts, river blyth, Sailors, Sea, Short stories, The Reliquary | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Today is a time of new beginnings and fresh starts, a time for contemplation, reflection and meditation on what has been and gone and what is yet to come. It is 2012, what wonders await us all? With it being the first of the month it’s time for the Pictonaut Challenge begin once again. If you’ve recently made a resolution to do more writing this year then the Pictonaut Challenge should serve as a nice little start. Only a thousand words a month, hardly anything in the way of rules and no real pressure to perform, how can any right thinking writer resist?
A new year always carries with it a little bit of mystery. No one really knows what’s in store, it is unknown and unknowable. This month’s picture has an air of the unknown about it, something I think is most fitting to the dawn of a new year.
Continue reading
1 Comment | tags: Mystery, new beginnings, New Year, Pictonauts, Resolutions, Short stories, The Reliquary, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So we’re finally here at the tail end of 2011. A year which has seen us frail and feckless humans stagger from crisis to crisis, lurching drunkenly through the year. Annus horribilis would not, in my opinion, be an inappropriate description. Riots, civil unrest, violence and economics once again threatening to destroy modern civilisation, it’s been a bit of a shit one if I’m honest. But as ever there is always the faint and guttering light at the end of the tunnel that is hope. Hope that next year will be better, that next year we’ll do things right, that this will be the year we’ll all pull together and make the world a better place. Inevitably that won’t be the case, but it’s nice to hope. Hope keeps you going.
I expect that, as I write this, a lot of you will be donning your glad rags for a night of revelry, drinking, debauchery and the fabrication of embarrassing moments that, come the dawn of 2012, you’ll want to pretend never happened. As for me I’ll be spending the evening in a darkened room, treating tonight like I would any other night: whiling away the hours until bed through a form of procrastination that I have elevated to a high art. It will also be the first time I’ve spent new year’s eve sober in nearly a decade, I’m sure this will prove to be a spectacularly novel experience. In the intervening period between now at the tolling of those twelve strikes at midnight it’s time to draw a line beneath December’s Pictonaut challenge.
Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: Drugs, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Psychedelic Lady, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
So December’s finally rolled around; the downward slide towards the end of the year. What a year it has been, but not in a good way, not for most people anyway. 2011 has been pretty awful, a year where I’m sure many people have uttered “well, it can’t get any worse can it?” only to then find out that, actually, it can. And what do we have to look forward to? In the long-term, more of the same. A government of the rich, by the rich, for the rich; a world primed to explode, collapse or implode; the bad times of world unrest raising its head once again. Gone are the free and happy peace-loving days of the 90s where everything really looked like it was one the up. Now we’re all back in the trenches, with nothing but shit and shells raining down on our heads. In the short-term we’ve got Christmas. That’s all right I suppose, even if it does mean spending time with people you generally dislike or don’t get on with, all the while having to smile and remain civil. Call me a cynic but everything I can see on the horizon is pants; garishly coloured pants woven from misery, misfortune and despair. But there is a glimmer of hope, a shinning beacon, a lighthouse. It is the return of the Pictonaut Challenge and it is your only hope for salvation in this dark and benighted world. (Maybe, but probably not) Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: colours, neon, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Psychedelic Lady, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Thus ends the turbulent non-month that is November. A great many things have happened this month, most of them perpetrated by fools. Be it the mustachioed madness of Movember, where hordes of hapless men grow their itchy face hair because suddenly prostate cancer is cool. Or alternatively the insanely optimistic troops of NaNoWriMo and their slog to an arbitrarily defined target.
I was one of these fools. I chose NaNoWriMo because it provided a challenge, it was productive, artsy, enriching and also because I can’t really grow a moustache. (I “won” in the end. I was very happy.) But despite all the hectic dashing about and the hurly-burly of this, that and the other, Pictonauts was still rumbling away in the background. Not the rumble of a mighty volcano fit to shower the surrounding locales with hot, steamy lava. More the rumbling of an empty tummy, or slightly cross cat. Continue reading
1 Comment | tags: NaNoWriMo, Pictonauts, Short stories, The Sphere, wordascope, Writing | posted in Pictonauts, Writing
Oh how much 
of a difference a week makes. What had been a fairly mundane demand of 1667 words a day has now become an uphill struggle, a real slog through a treacley sea of shitty words.
I’m still on the NaNo wagon for now, but how much longer I can hang on I’m not entirely sure. I’d say I’m getting pretty close to burn out. Which would be slightly frustrating, especially with about 31,500 words under my belt. I thought at passing 25k I was over the hump and it’d be a nice downhill slope to the finish line. Nope, turns out it was just a slight flattening before another big hill. Arse.
Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
Tuesday saw the start of my first attempt at NaNoWriMo. I have now been slogging away at it for almost five days. I’m honestly not entirely sure who I am any more, nor what I have become. I have a strange nagging feeling that there is something akin to unholy witchcraft about the entire concept of NaNoWriMo. There’s no pressure to perform, no real demands, only a vague nebulous challenge of “oh go on, just see if you can hit 50,000 words by the end of this month. If you can’t do it that no one’s going to think less of you. We’re all friends here.” It’s insidious and sneaky. I just simply cannot stop writing. It’s an urge that’s gotten under my skin, it’s a contagious disease spreading across the blogosphere and the internet. There is no cure, there is only success or failure.
Continue reading
Leave a comment | tags: High Noon in Outer Space, Misquotes, NaNoWriMo, Ramblings, Writing | posted in Ramblings, Writing
The Rogue Verbumancer 